Critics reviews

This poised feature debut from Nicolas Pesce announces a director who blends arthouse with horror to unnerving, elegant effect... The film loses some of its cruel precision and restraint in a third act that goes all out for shock value. As a result, the picture ends up more conventional and less intriguing than its early promise suggested.

Ariel Loh provides an eerie electric score that feels unsettlingly disconnected from the action, and there are also songs by the great Portuguese fado singer Amália Rodrigues. And there's an utterly unnerving performance at the center of it all: Kika Magalhaes embodies both distracted menace and a strange, other-worldly fragility. All in all, this is a compellingly strange film, and definitely the real thing, even if it's finally not 100 percent my thing.

To really show that it's serious, and not mere Midnight Movie junk, the violence is either kept outside the image or elided by jarringly casual jumps to the aftermath. When we briefly visit a middle-of-nowhere, very American dive bar, it's like we've discovered what we thought was an alien planet was Earth all along. This is all according to plan. For his visually assured yet structurally sloppy directorial debut, Nicolas Pesce wants to keep us permanently and in every way off-balance.

The film benefits from Zach Kuperstein's moody black-and-white cinematography and the stark compositions, but the unrelenting ugliness and senselessness of the piece negate its occasional touches of minimalist beauty.

At once briskly and deliberately paced, sustaining a precise narrative clarity even as it seems to flow with the logic of a nightmare, the film confounds expectations and defies easy categorization. Is it a high-art "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"? A feminist rethink of the Ed Gein story? All of the above, perhaps, though it also turns out to be about something much more universal, which is a child's instinctive desire for companionship — a need that will ultimately be met, and by any means necessary.

Desperately hugging her father's corpse in clouded bath water, or swabbing inky pools of blood, Ms. Magalhaes, a former dancer, uses her expressive eyes and graceful limbs to bring the intimacy and sensuality of her actions to vivid life. As with Catherine Deneuve's character in "Repulsion" (1965), isolation has whipped latent disease into a full-blown pathology.

With its arty compositions and ponderous pace Eyes recalls Richard Marx's unintentionally hilarious "Hazard" music video more than, say, The Night of the Living Dead, but you take what you can when a movie's other offerings are so meager... How meager? Put aside the photography and Eyes is little more than the caboose on the torture-porn train, with Psycho-esque Freudian pretensions to boot.

Pesce flatlines all emotionality and intellectualism, offering images and scenarios that exist in a void of contrivance. There are no reasons for the characters to do what they do here beyond the necessity of the jerry-rigged plot, which borrows from dozens of other sources and abounds in ludicrous dime-store Freudian intrigue and Oedipal obsessions that are common of self-consciously arty horror films.

Nicolas Pesce's striking debut The Eyes of My Mother is also concerned with an outsider's madness in America... Pesce's colourless presentation and elliptical editing offer a blinkered perspective on events which replicates both the protagonist's ocular obsessions and the mutual incomprehension of Francisca and those she encounters. For this is a film in which a succession of horrors take place just out of sight, perpetrated by a (metaphorically) myopic heroine as blind as her victims.

Thankfully explicitly visual in his approach, Pesce prefers to revel in the sensory flavours of, e.g., elderly bodies in murky bath water, the excreted mucus from emptied eye sockets, and scarred figures emerging from opaque clouds of darkness. It's probably too ridiculous to truly "work," but it's haptic and assertive in a way I found welcoming rather than alienating, which is something (if nothing more).

NEXT played host to the bone-chilling The Eyes of My Mother, a beautifully shot black-and-white chronicle of the development of a psychopath, from traumatized child to deranged young woman. That might sound like an endorsement, but it's not. Nicolas Pesce's debut feature, however artful, is the kind of film that defines the word "unnecessary." It's chockful of torture; it's yet another form of torture to endure it.

Serial murder has rarely seemed a more melancholy calling than it does in "The Eyes of My Mother," a short, decidedly unsweet and wholly startling vision. Meshing an especially bloody strain of slasher pic with the most whispery of high-art sensibilities, this tale of a young Portuguese-American woman drawn into severely psychotic behavior reps an exquisite waking nightmare, its meticulous monochrome imagery caressing the eye even as the filmmaker brandishes a scalpel before it.